The film stars Tom Cruise, who also produced, along with Timothy Spall, Ken Watanabe, Billy Connolly, Tony Goldwyn, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Koyuki Kato in supporting roles.

The film's plot was inspired by the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, led by Saigō Takamori, and the Westernization of Japan by foreign powers.

[a] Cruise portrays Nathan Algren, an American captain of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, whose personal and emotional conflicts bring him into contact with samurai warriors in the wake of the Meiji Restoration in 19th century Japan.

The character of Algren is very loosely based on Eugène Collache and Jules Brunet, both French Imperial Guard officers who fought alongside Enomoto Takeaki in the earlier Boshin War.

In 1876, former U.S. Army Captain Nathan Algren, an alcoholic traumatized by the atrocities during the American Indian Wars, is approached by his former commanding officer, Colonel Bagley.

At a government meeting, Omura orders Katsumoto's arrest for carrying a sword in public and tells him to perform seppuku the next day to redeem his honor.

As the Imperial Army marches to crush the rebellion, a grieving Katsumoto contemplates seppuku, but Algren convinces him to fight and pledges to join the samurai in battle.

Ward became executive producer on the film – working in development on it for nearly four years and after approaching several directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Weir, until he became interested with Edward Zwick.

[10] All music on the soundtrack was composed, arranged, and produced by Hans Zimmer, performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony, and conducted by Blake Neely.

The site's consensus states: "With high production values and thrilling battle scenes, The Last Samurai is a satisfying epic.

[16] Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic.

"[17] One online analyst compares the movie favorably to Dances with Wolves in that each protagonist meets and combats a "technologically backward people".

"[13] Todd McCarthy, a film critic for the Variety magazine, wrote: "Clearly enamored of the culture it examines while resolutely remaining an outsider's romanticization of it, yarn is disappointingly content to recycle familiar attitudes about the nobility of ancient cultures, Western despoilment of them, liberal historical guilt, the unrestrainable greed of capitalists and the irreducible primacy of Hollywood movie stars.

"[27] According to the history professor Cathy Schultz, "Many samurai fought Meiji modernization not for altruistic reasons but because it challenged their status as the privileged warrior caste.

The film also misses the historical reality that many Meiji policy advisors were former samurai, who had voluntarily given up their traditional privileges to follow a course they believed would strengthen Japan.

"Though he had agreed to become a member of the new government," wrote the translator and historian Ivan Morris, "it was clear from his writings and statements that he believed the ideals of the civil war were being vitiated.

Suspicious of the new bureaucracy, he wanted power to remain in the hands of the samurai class and the Emperor, and for those reasons, he had joined the central government.

"Edicts like the interdiction against carrying swords and wearing the traditional topknot seemed like a series of gratuitous provocations; and, though Saigō realized that Japan needed an effective standing army to resist pressure from the West, he could not countenance the social implications of the military reforms.

[29] In 2014, the movie was one of several discussed by Keli Goff in The Daily Beast in an article on white savior narratives in film,[30] a cinematic trope studied in sociology, for which The Last Samurai has been analyzed.

[31] David Sirota at Salon saw the film as "yet another film presenting the white Union army official as personally embodying the North's Civil War effort to liberate people of color" and criticizing the release poster as "a not-so-subtle message encouraging audiences to (wrongly) perceive the white guy -- and not a Japanese person -- as the last great leader of the ancient Japanese culture.

"[32] In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, Ken Watanabe stated that he didn't think of The Last Samurai as a white savior narrative and that it was a turning point for Asian representation in Hollywood.